Richard Goode Plays Bach and Schubert

The pianist Richard Goode played Bach and Schubert on Thursday at the Kaplan Penthouse as part of the series A Little Night Music.

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

August 1, 2014

The intimacy, informality and late-night starting time of the A Little Night Music series at the Kaplan Penthouse have made it one of the most popular innovations to come out of Lincoln Center in years. On Thursday night, the eminent pianist Richard Goode, fresh from his performance of a Mozart concerto with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra on Tuesday at Avery Fisher Hall, played the first of six programs in the series that the festival is presenting this summer.

These concerts start at 10 p.m. and run an hour without intermission. The audience clearly relishes the rare opportunity to end a summer day by settling in for some fine music. Programs at the penthouse, with its skyline views, are refreshingly informal. People sit at small round tables enjoying a glass of free wine. There are seats for only 234 people, and the place looked full for Mr. Goode’s program of Bach and Schubert on Thursday.

It’s not often that one gets to sit so close to a major pianist at work. Of course, being near Mr. Goode took some adjusting, too. Even as a younger man, he had a rumpled professor look and some physical tics as a performer. Now, at 71, he truly fits the image of a disheveled eccentric. Occasionally you could hear him singing along with a surging inner voice or grunting to reinforce a burst of fortissimo chords. At times he would conduct a left-hand line when his right hand was momentarily available. Somehow, though, in this intimate space, the quirks enhanced the communicative power of his playing. Here was an artist with nothing to hide, with no concert-protocol pretenses.

Mr. Goode began with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in C and No. 16 in G minor from the “Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II.” He brought breadth and freedom to the C major prelude without distorting the music’s shape and structure. In the complex Fugue in G minor, he highlighted inner voices naturally; there was no hint of a didactic pianist pointing out details in the music.

He then turned to Schubert’s Sonata in B flat, written in the last months of the composer’s appallingly short life (he died at 31). In the first movement, Mr. Goode took a calmly undulant tempo and essentially held to it during the episodic shifts in this deceptively lyrical, mysterious, often dark music. In the pensive Andante, he played the mournful melodic line with lyrical suppleness while eerily articulating the delicate rhythmic figure that runs through the music obsessively. The scherzo had youthful grace and charm, though the uneasy undercurrents that break out in the minor-mode middle section also came through.

In the final movement, Mr. Goode vividly conveyed a sense that here was music in conflict with itself. A seemingly playful, almost cute theme tries to spin out. But countering that mood are ominous elements, like a bare octave that keeps intruding. The movement ends curiously, with a short, rousing coda, a burst of affirmation that seems to come out of nowhere.

At the end of Mr. Goode’s distinguished performance, the audience, having listened to this 40-minute sonata with rapt attention, broke into a lusty ovation.

The Mostly Mozart Festival runs through Aug. 23 at various Manhattan locations; the violist Antoine Tamestit plays the next program in the A Little Night Music series at the Kaplan Penthouse on Saturday; 212-721-6500, mostlymozart.org